Saltasaurus

This article is for a speculative species; a creature that has not been assigned to a taxon by any official media or material. It may not be intended to represent an actual species. However, if a reasonable representation of a real species is found, it will be identified as closely as possible.

Unreasonable or overly speculative articles may be deleted for the sake of parsimony.

Saltasaurus was a large plant-eating dinosaur with an elongated neck and bony armored plates on its body. It was a titanosaurid sauropod that lived during the late Cretaceous Period, about 83 to 79 million years ago. Fossils have been found in Argentina.

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Description

Saltasaurus was named by paleontologists J. Bonaparte and J. Powell in 1980. Salta is the name of the Northwestern Argentinian Province where fossils were found. They include: a few oval and circular armored plates, hundreds of bumps which covered its back (roughly 1/4 inch = 6-7 mm in diameter), and several incomplete skeletons, including some vertebrae, limb bones, and jaws.

Paleobiology

A large titanosaurid nest was found in Auca Mahuevo, in Patagonia, Argentina. The small eggs had fossilised embryos, complete with skin impressions. [1]